10 weeks
29.11.2021 - 17.02.22
Since I the rough game concept was my idea, I wanted to focus on keeping that vision alive while developing it further with a full team, so I opted out of full production for this project.
Instead, I was responsible for keeping the team on track, and making any final design decisions.
Vision Keeping & Design Lead
Design & Management
Vision & Lead
My main focus of this game project was not actually bringing my own idea to life - games are a team effort. It was to make sure that everyone knows what is happening at each phase, and that everyone is heard andcontent with the game.
Though, of course, tough decisions have to be made, and it was my responsibility and risk to make them. For that, I cut out a good chunk of features, mostly ones I was working on myself, to really set the game's focus on the entanglement mechanic. I wanted to strive for depth, not complexity, and adding any extra features before exhausting the possibilities of our entanglement mechanic to the fullest would have gone against that principle.
An extra stealth section might have worked in a longer game, but not in the first hour of puzzle game runtime.
Narrative Work
While the game definitely is a mechanic driven game and the story can, intentionally, be fully ignored, I put a lot of care into crafting the world and its characters. It doesn't show in the final project, and I don't mind because it was still helpful, but the story actually goes much further than our little mock game demo.
All major characters have real historical and scientific influences. The in-game world is a funky mix of mad science and high fantasy, but nothing is made up from thin air. Also, I made sure to portray the scientists' actions as immoral and even evil, but it was important to me that the scientists themselves were painted very human. Cruel, but no mere monsters.
Read more of the story!
If you liked the characters, or wanted to know more about the lab, feel free to check out the story doc i wrote for the team.
Not all of it has made it into the game, nor was all of it relevant for it, but it helped me visualise it properly :)
Characters, irl inspo, world, and plot
High Concept
For a quick overview, check out this doc with a One Pager made by our skilled Gameplay Designer Dominik:
Engine Work
Pickups & Dialogue
Additionally to writing and being responsible for Narrative Design, I wrote a simple dialogue system. The text, name, and ID can be added in engine so it's easy for everyone to make changes.
CineMachine
We used CineMachine in this project. I set up the cameras and transitions for the general gameplay, but also for the dialogue and the observe points that show all the details of the world we created.
​
The option to rotate the camera helps players with orienting themselves and figuring out possible ways to solve the puzzles. It also makes the world feel more dynamic and it encourages exploration. Some easter eggs can only be found by rotating the camera :)
Art Implementation
Early in the pre-production, we knew that we were going to work with a lot of 2D objects and a 2D main character so I looked for a way to make those work in a 3D space with a semi-flexible camera.
We used a billboard script and a sprite shader that enabled the sprites both to cast and recieve shadows, and to react to strong light in the environment.
​
I also helped with level art and furnished the first level. Our tech / level artist gave it the final pass to make it all fit together.
Art Assets
here's some of the art assets I made for the game. All pieces in the collage actually made it into the final product, while the scientist portraits were unfortunately left out due to tme constraints.Â
The blue illustration was a first concept before the project had started. Crazy to see what our artists did with that, I couldn't be more excited!
Team Fish in a Pocket
The team decided to submit the game to Ubisoft's graduate student contest and won third place :)
Please do check out the team by clicking the image above!
.png)